2024 has marked the centenary of Franz Kafka’s early death from tuberculosis. In August we visited an exhibition in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which holds the majority of Franz Kafka’s archive. This inspired me to find out more about Franz’s life. A podcast (Ottla Kafka, la sœur chérie : hors du monde haïssable) led me to his remarkable sister, Ottla, and his Letters to Ottla and the Family.
Ottla was born in 1892, the youngest of Franz’s three sisters. Although there was an age difference of nine years, as she grew up the two siblings became very close. Franz was to write that ‘the love to the others notwithstanding,’ Ottla was ‘the dearest by far‘. In different ways, both Franz and Ottla rebelled against the bourgeois conventions and expectations of their Jewish merchant father, and supported each other in their struggles for independence.
Against her parents’ wishes but with Franz’s encouragement, Ottla decided she wanted to work in agriculture. In 1917, aged 25, she took over the farm of a member of her family in Zürau in Bohemia. Franz joined her there, helped in the gardens, and found an environment in which he could write. In 1918 he helped her identify possible agricultural colleges. He obtained catalogues and sought guidance as to which might be suitable and prepared to accept a female student. He even offered to pay the fees. Eventually Ottla became the first woman to study at the Friedland agricultural school.
Ottla’s two sisters, Elli and Valli, had gone along with their parents’ choice of an appropriate Jewish man to marry. However, Ottla was again not prepared to submit to her family’s wishes. Instead in July 1920 she married Josef David, a Czech Catholic. Franz once more supported her, writing that: ‘You know that you are doing something extraordinary and that it is extremely difficult to do the extraordinary well.’ Later he wrote again that ‘since between the two of us you are the more suitable one (to get married) you are doing it for us… In exchange, I am staying single for both of us.’
Equally, Ottla supported Franz in his own struggles. Above all, she recognised the importance of his writing. As well as moral support she offered him places where he could write in peace. He stayed in her flat in Prague and in the farm in Zürau, from which he wrote to his friend Max Brod that ‘Ottla carries me on her wings through a difficult world‘. And as his tuberculosis developed, she helped to persuade his employer to allow him time off work, and eventually early retirement (Franz wrote to her to thank her for ‘a terrific job’). Before his death in 1924 he got to know Ottla’s two daughters, and stayed in her family homes in Planá and Schelesen.
Marthe Bernard, who wrote extensively about Franz and translated many of this writings into French, commented that ‘The letters to Ottla reflect … a very, very close and affectionate relationship‘. And in one of his final letters to Ottla in October 1923, by which time his health was declining fast, his love and respect for his sister shines through:
‘We do not need to discuss whether you would disturb me. If everything else in the world were to disturb me – and it has almost reached that point – not you.’
Ottla’s independent spirit proved too much for her husband, and they eventually divorced. The exact circumstances of the divorce are not entirely clear, but it coincided with the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. It seems very likely that one of Ottla’s motivations was to protect her husband and children from the dangers they faced with a Jewish wife and mother. In doing this however, she put herself at even greater risk, and in 1943 the Nazis deported her to the Terezín ghetto (Thereseinstadt in German).
Here she worked closely with orphaned children, including a group of Polish children who arrived emaciated and extremely frightened. In her moving last letter to her daughters in October 1943 she wrote that she had volunteered to accompany the children on what turned out to be the journey to Auschwitz. Here they – and she (aged just 50) – were murdered on arrival.
I have found Ottla’s story inspiring – she must have been a remarkable person. She also offers a profound reminder of the dangers of extreme right wing ideas becoming acceptable. Scapegoating particular groups of people blinds us to the immense human value of individuals like Ottla who, in Franz’s words, was ‘pure, true and honest, (always able to balance) humility and pride, loyalty and independence, modesty and courage‘. Unsurprisingly, her story has also inspired a song.
Both of Franz’s other sisters, their husbands and most of their children also died in the death camps. However, Ottla’s daughters stayed safely with their father, in no small part thanks to Ottla’s self-sacrifice. They preserved the letters from Franz and these were published in German in 1974, and in English in 1982. In 2021 the Bodleian Library and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach purchased them jointly. Unfortunately her letters to him have not survived. However, her letters to her husband and daughters leave us with the voice of a very special woman.
See also:
Letters to Ottla and the Family is published in English by Penguin and is available as an ebook.
A biography, Ottla Kafka: The tragic fate of Kafka’s favourite sister by Petr Balajka is available in Czech and German but not, to my knowledge, in English.
